AT&T Considers Cellphone Plans Subsidized by Ads

AT&T is considering offering wireless phone plans partially subsidized by advertising as soon as a year from now, Chief Executive John Stankey said in an interview on Tuesday. From a report: The consideration, which has not been previously disclosed, underscores AT&T's commitment to the advertising business as the U.S. phone carrier reviews its portfolio to identify assets to sell in order to reduce its debt load. AT&T is considering selling its advertising-technology unit Xandr, sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters. "I believe there's a segment of our customer base where given a choice, they would take some load of advertising for a $5 or $10 reduction in their mobile bill," Stankey said. Various companies including Amazon.com, Virgin Mobile USA and Sprint's Boost Mobile have tested advertising supported phone services since the early 2000s but they have not caught on. AT&T is hoping that better advertising targeting could revive the idea.

Not for $5 or $10

[Turkinolith]

"$5 or $10 reduction in their mobile bill" That's it? I'm not going to invite that type of annoyance into my life for a miserly $5-$10 reduction.

Re:

[Mister Transistor]

Well, that lasted what, 4 days? Good job, it was nice not seeing these ass-wiped rolls of used toilet paper on EVERY FUCKING THREAD HERE. For a few days.

Obviously you just manually deleted a few of these.

WTF, /.???

Do you need a fucking PROGRAMMER to FIX THIS FOR YOU OR WHAT????

Depends on how intrusive

[rsilvergun]

being AT&T I'm guessing very, but you never know. I had a "Blu" phone that I bought for $50 bucks that had specs in line with a $200+ phone. The Ads were on the lock screen.... that you could easily change without rooting the phone :).

And of course you could buy this, root the phone and disable the ads, or just ad-block :P.

Re:

[DarkOx]

I am already subsidizing the 90% of the content I consume on my mobile via phone bill paying for an expensive metered data plan so I can download all those shitty ads in the first place. I am sure this ultimately costs me more than just micropayments to the sites directly.

Now AT&T is going to give me a discount if I consume even more ads... its turtles all the way down.

Re:

[inode_buddha]

In other words, the exact same thing that happened with cable TV. In my area, the original franchise agreements with the cities stated that there would be no ads since the lines etc. were subsidized by the rate payers.... Fast forward to today, see how many ads there are, and rates have never gone down..... Using every tiny little excuse possible.

The real problem is that no matter how rich they are, it will never be enough for them.

Re:Not for $5 or $10

[ceoyoyo]

Ah, but some people are poor, so $5-$10 off would be important for them. Question is, what kind of advertiser would target that type of customer?

Oh, right. Payday loans, lotteries, debt consolidators, only the best of the best.

Re:Not for $5 or $10

[LostMyAccount]

You do realize that it's not about offering you a $10 savings, it's normalizing this enough that everyone gets ads and you're willing to pay $20/month more to not get ads (but still endure the tracking).

Re:

[hiroshimarrow]

100% This.

Re:

[mpol]

My monthly bill is 10 Euro, so that means my internet connection is suddenly free :)

I live in the Netherlands and get 5GB for 10 Euro a month. I don't need more that that. Please be aware that I would not opt-in to this service, I will happily pay 10 Euro. But I can imagine for someone on a small budget this can be important. You shave off every expense that you can.

Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

Users consider cellphone-free existence.

$5-$10 reduction?

[Sebby]

I believe there's a segment of our customer base where given a choice, they would take some load of advertising for a $5 or $10 reduction in their mobile bill,

It'd take a way larger reduction before I'd let these fuckers rape my privacy, especially since they've been known to sell/give access to other privacy rapists (location data to collectors, law enforcement/FBI, etc.) without informing customs in the past.

Re:$5-$10 reduction?

[supremebob]

I'd imagine that this would become a slippery slope pretty quickly, where they first give people a $10 discount, and then lower it to $5, and then eventually enable the ads on all new devices and require you to pay an additional fee to have the ads disabled.

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

Surely that can't be a direct comparison to cable TV. /sarcasm

Re:

[Compuser]

This will fairly quickly drive people to VOIP and open source call apps with no ads (e.g. Signal). Once you add cost to something people will have an incentive to cut the cost out. If I had to deal with ads from all carriers I would probably install a hotspot in my car and use cell service on the go via a filtered router. The rest of the time it would be wifi only. Cell carriers only exist because they offer convenience so they are a bit limited in how far they can push it.

Re:

[DarkOx]

I doubt that will work. If its anything like verizon (have not used T in a long time because they don't offer good service in my area) they won't let you put any kind of hotspot on a low tier plan. They probably wont off the ads discount on any upper tier plan. You might get around that by use a rooted/jailbroken handset class device and tethering it but don't for a second think you are going to hang a router off a jetpack and get the cheap rate.

Some of the auto manufactures have special deals for their

Re:

[GuB-42]

A $10 discount for ads and a $10 extra for no ads is the same thing. It can be a technique to increase the base price without saying it upfront, but no matter the way they present it no ads is $10 more than ads.

And it shouldn't affect your way. If you think paying $10 to remove ads is worth it, just pay. If not, don't pay. If another carrier is more interesting once that discount/premium is taken into account, switch to that carrier.

If you dislike ads, like many people here, just pay, the more people choose

Re:

[bn-7bc]

Well in a way yes, but there is a difference, say you pay $20/mounth now, then they kaunch a new pkan with exactly the same min/texts/Mbs for $10/month ( ad suppirted, This changes your bill by exactly $0/mounth and you still have no ads, you could ofc say that you have the new plan but pay a 20$10/ month add blicking fee, but IMHO this would be taking a bit if a negative view, but hey I tend to at keast try to look at the bright side. The slipoery slope however is a bit of an issue, but IMHO thus us not

*installs adblocker*

[LenKagetsu]

Yeah sure that sounds good.

Re:

[NateFromMich]

Yeah sure that sounds good.

On on bootloader locked phone that nobody supports aftermarket because it's exclusively for idiots?

Good luck.

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

I'd imagine they'd be serving the ads from a layer deep enough in the phones' software that an adblocker wouldn't do anything.

Optimism

[JaredOfEuropa]

better advertising targeting could revive the idea.

Yeah, right. All that collected data, all the cookies and fingerprinting, the AIs, and the other vast resources brought to bear on "improving" advertising, still fail to prevent services from serving me the same damn ad 5 times within one hour, or showing me ads for crap I have already bought. Maybe those AIs decided that repeatingly showing an ad is effective, but whether it's by design or by ineptitude, I want no part of it.

They already do this: Pay to block spam calls

[Perfycat321]

They already charge $4 a month to block spam calls. Isn't this the same thing as charging for advertising? They are just charging the customer rather than the advertiser. The "feature" is called AT&T Call Protect Plus. https://www.att.com/support/ar... [att.com]

AT&T Call Protect Plus
Want more protection? Upgrade to the Call Protect Plus 2 service for $3.99 per month to get advanced call-blocking capabilities.
When you upgraded, you'll get all the protection and features of Call Protect Basic and Plu

Re:

[agent_blue]

Spam and advertising are two subtly different things, and this call protect feature is designed to block unwanted spam calls. In fact, it appears that the basic call protect service is provided at no cost, and if you wanted some additional features like reverse number lookup, caller-ID and some more sophisticated call controls, then that is 4$ a month.

I don't think it's worth 4$ a month because spoofing caller-ID is the norm, so it useless.

Re:

[Turkinolith]

Thing is, spam calls arn't really as much of a problem I'm having these days compared to spam TEXTS that I get all the time.

Correct price for that level of intrusion

[BytePusher]

$0, no credit checks or credit card, unlimited talking, text and data. Second, add a secure payment system like Apple Pay, but with Venmo capability for peer to peer micropayments. It might only work with Android phones, but the market segment going for free cell service won't care. No other pricing plans will fly, but AT&T would make a dump truck load of money with their advertising business as everyone would flock to them and they would have a microscope on your browsing/purchasing behavior.

Nope - it's gonna cost you more than that

[willoughby]

Heck, I get $5 off of my (non-ATT) phone bill just for signing up for auto-pay. There's no way I'd tolerate ads for $10 or less.

Something old is new again...

[t4ng*]

I was an engineer at Qualcomm and Kyocera Wireless in the late 90's and early 00's during the development of smartphones. Cell service providers, at that time, were planning to offer free smartphones and free service because they knew they could make a ton of money spying on their customers, peering into their bank transactions, selling data to advertisers, and providing geolocated ads based not only on the customer's current location, but also on their past spending habits. It was all made legal by laws written by the industry and handed over to Congress for passage. Then, the industry figured out their customers were dumb enough to pay for the privilege of having their information sold and being inundated with ads. Is AT&T really in such bad shape that they would revert to the original plan to gain some customers.

Really?

[nospam007]

"I believe there's a segment of our customer base where given a choice, they would take some load of advertising for a $5 or $10 reduction in their mobile bill,"

I pay 15€ a month with unlimited call and texts to all operators in Europe and 4GB full speed downloads, slowed after those.

I wouldn't accept ads even if they paid me for it.

Death Spiral

[bob4u2c]

Sounds like AT&T is in a death spiral.

With the purchase of Directv and its demise, the slow migration of DSL customers to cable, people dumping landlines for competitors cell phones and networks, promised [X]G speeds which aren't anywhere close to [X]G, and the just really bad customer service AT&T provides I can't see how they can stay in business.

So sure, start running ads until you loose the rest of your customers.

'Debt load'? What 'debt load'?

[Rick Schumann]

So far as I can see, U.S. telecoms are price-gouging the living fuck out of their customers, so how is it they have any 'debt load' to want to reduce?
Screw you, AT&T. So glad I don't directly do business with you anymore.

Re:

[bn-7bc]

Well you see beeing a telco is not sexy (at keas nit to wall street) so telcis want to be ither things as well, content providers/makers etc etc etc, all these things cist a lot of money, and then there is 5g... , they could ifc found this from profits , but that ineferese with the ever increasing profits mantra, besides debt is cheap atm so lever up ( the debt will not mature untill the current board has keft anyway so the don’t give a shit)

This is just the beginning

[ravenscar]

I can almost guarantee that this is just the first step. First it will be "you can buy our ad-supported plan and save X." Next, it will be "we've incorporated ads into all of our plans and we are passing the savings of X on to you." That will be followed a year or two later by "in order to provide you the cutting-edge service you expect we have to increase our price by X (which just happens to equal what you were saving by inclusion of ads). Before long, people will be paying more than ever and will hav

All or Nothing.

[Fly Swatter]

Either advertisements make the service free, or I want no advertisements at all in any service I pay for.

Oh wait it's AT&T, so I don't care, carry on.

Remember NetZero?

[lfp98]

Ad-supported free dial-up internet. Started with great fanfare, but soon enough there were so many ads it became completely unusable. You just can't put in enough ads to generate enough revenue to make it worthwhile. And you can't run the whole economy on ads, eventually people have to buy something and pay for it.

Re:

[Babel-17]

Yes, I was going to post about that, and do you remember how there were hacks to block most of the ads from appearing?

Death knell

[WolfgangVL]

Squeeze every drop of juice before the whole thing gets thrown away. How's this model working out for cable?

hard pass

[fluffernutter]

Hard pass. I'll pay thanks.

Once there were even free budget PCs given out

[Babel-17]

The catch being that you were totally tracked online and subject to ads. IIRC in one instance of that it ended well for the customers, as the company went under but to their credit they told everyone to just keep the computers. Here's one example, though probably not what I was remembering. https://www.eschoolnews.com/19... [eschoolnews.com]

Nope Nope Nope

[p51d007]

I'll NOT have stupid ads on my phone. Getting ready to call someone and have to put up with a 15-30 second ad? Open a webpage, only to be redirected for an ad. Text message but you get an ad? NOPE, no thanks!